πŸ––πŸ» Joel Gethin Lewis

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πŸ‘‹πŸ» About:

I am a consultant, course leader and artist.

As a consultant, I curate context and design constraints for projects.

  1. Curating context: I produce reference material, similar projects and other content that helps put a potential or current project into a wider context.
  2. Designing constraints: in order to help a project progress, I create limitations that allow a team to concentrate on a smaller set of challenges and move forward, learning from the process.

I love being a catalyst for learning for both students and clients, helping them to build capacity and enabling them to pass on their knowledge to others. I particularly love thinking about new uses of technology as part of a group and then helping to make those uses happen.

In learning I'm interested in connectivism, threshold concepts, open source and being anti-obfuscatory, or against the obscuring of communication.

Ever since I saw the Wizard of Oz I've been interested in the mechanisms or systems that enable stories to be told or society to function. I am interested in making work that allows for real-time interaction between people, places, stories and objects through the use of technology.

I am currently researching solar-powered computing, the history of weaving and global scale augmented reality sculpture.

If you've got a joke, poem, recipe, spell or otherwise, get in touch:

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🎁 Now:

Since 2017 I've consulted for organisations on a freelance basis - based on more than 20 years of experience working on interactive projects that blend the analogue and digital to make something new. Some organisations that I've worked with:

Since 2022 I've been the Course Leader of the UAL Diploma in Apple Development 🍎 at the Creative Computing Institute, Camberwell, University of the Arts London. Find out more about the course in this interview. For the 2024/2025 academic year the course has been completely revised to focus on the Vision Pro spatial computing headset.

Since 2024 I've been a mentor at the New Museums's New Inc program - the first museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology.

Since 2017 I've been a mentor at Arts Emergency, which aims to increase access to the arts and humanities to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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πŸ“£ Testimonies:

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πŸ—― Maxims:

Some quotes of mine that I keep repeating:

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⏳ Previously:

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🧠 Research:

Since 2017 I've been researching two long term projects:

  1. EveryWhere: a solar powered, mesh networked, open source hardware and software platform that allows anyone to add augmented reality content to their environment.
  2. Another Sky: a series of global scale augmented reality sculptures, inspired by the history of weaving and digital simulations of life.

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πŸ“½ Presentations:

I've been giving presentations internationally since 2207. Highlights include a D&AD Presidents Lecture, Edinburgh Festival, In-progress, New World/Today at Apple, What Design Can Do, TOCA ME, Dorkbot, INSTINT, Design Indaba, Art && Code, FutureEverything, OFFF, All Flows, Semi-Permanent and SΓ³nar. For an example please see my 2019 lecture on ten thoughts for the future.

I've presented at the following conferences and events:

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πŸ›  Workshops:

I've been running workshops around the world about paper prototyping and creativity in general since 2008. For an example please see my 2018 workshop on Paper Prototyping for Year Here.

Some previous workshops:

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πŸ•Έ Other websites:

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πŸŽͺ Exhibitions:

As part of Hellicar&Lewis:

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πŸ“š Publications:

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πŸŽ“ Qualifications:

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πŸ’­ Unrealised Projects:

Please get in touch if you'd like to discuss them:

  1. Infrasound
  2. Five Systems
  3. Memosyne Atlas II
    • Rebuild the Memosyne Atlas, but reimagined with new insights provided by machine learning.
  4. Room
    • A room with a single lightbulb that turns off when everyone in the room has their eyes closed.
  5. Half waterfall half nothing
    • An ambisonic sound installation. Half the room is completely silent, half sounds like the depths of a waterfall.
  6. Pass
    • An American motel room inside a white cube. Visitors enter via the front door. Inside the motel room, it feels like 2am. Cars passing outside the room cast light through the blinds of the room.
  7. Escher Sentences
    • A series of hand drawn graphite pencil statements on A0 pieces of archival paper. Each statement is an Escher sentence – also known as a comparative illusion. For example: "More people have been to Russia than I have".
  8. The Ouroboros Array
    • Inspired by the Ouroboros. An array of separate rooms are linked by placing dual projectors in them, with projection screens. Cameras face the screens. Each room is linked to the next and previous room in the array of rooms via the camera and screen pairs. The final room in the array is linked to the first, in an infinite loop for the duration of the installation. In this way, a person can clap in any of the rooms and have the clap pass down the chain to the their left and have it come back to them on their right, and vice versa.
  9. Critical Opalescence
    • Inspired by a passage from The Scientist as Rebel by the late Freeman Dyson.
    • Water is shown at critical opalescence in a series of glass containers, so that light might be projected through them. The necessary equipment to maintain the physical phenomenon surrounds each sample of water. The light is projected on the matt white walls of an otherwise pitch black room.
  10. The A***hole Room
    • A single room, one vertical wall entirely full of Marshall amplifiers, floor to ceiling. Every amp visibly cabled to a single contact microphone gaffer taped securely to the floor of the room. Every amplifier is powered, with all dials at maximum. Visitors must tiptoe if they want to keep their sense of hearing. All other surfaces are painted matt white.
  11. The Whole World
    • The current human population is 7,969,911 at the time of publication. What does a particle simulation of 7 billion particles look like? Is it possible to set up a series of screens so that individual pixels could represent a single human? What about for other forms of life?
  12. The Chain
    • Whenever you touch a thing in a space, you see all the people that have ever touched it.
  13. Tracks
    • An augmented reality iOS app that allows you to recognise different animal tracks, identifying the animal and creating an animation of them walking the steps in camera.

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⏰ Chronology:

A work in progress:

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